Microsoft finally admits Windows Phone is dead

In a series of tweets, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore has revealed that the software giant is no longer developing new features or hardware for Windows 10 Mobile. While Windows Phone fans had hoped Microsoft would update the platform with new features, it’s now clear the operating system has been placed into servicing mode, with just bug fixes and security updates for existing users.

I was a first adopter of Windows Phone 7 – so much so I imported a device from the US during launch week. It was an amazing operating system to use, and I loved it. Soon, however, it became clear Microsoft was unable to attract developers to the platform, and even those applications that did make it weren’t particularly good – not even the ones written by Microsoft itself, which were often simple HTML-based apps, which simply weren’t good advocates for the platform. As a Windows Phone user, you were always scraping the very bottom of the barrel when it came to applications.

To make matters worse, the move to Windows NT with Windows Phone 8 was a disaster. Existing phones weren’t updated, and instead, only got an entirely pointless Windows Phone 7.8 update. This didn’t do anything to enamour users to the platform, which makes it all the more weird when Microsoft did it again when Windows Phone 10 was released. In any event, Windows Phone 8 did mature over its short lifetime, gaining many features other platforms had had for ages. Sadly, the application situation never improved, and to this day, the Windows Store is a ghost town.

It really sucks that Windows Phone became a victim of blatant mismanagement and market forces, because I still love the operating system and its unique UI. One day, I’ll have to sit down and write the counterpart to my Palm retrospective, covering the entire PocketPC/Windows Mobile/Windows Phone era.

It’s been a wild ride.

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66 Comments

I feel what Microsoft did to Nokia is even worse. They sold the N9 in crappy markets and it still outsold Windows Phones. They they killed that OS which could have actually had a chance unlike the software they were pushing.

Disclaimer: I loved my N800 and I would still use my N900 if it weren’t so RAM deprived… and I had system patches.

There’s a LOT of revisionism amongst Maemo fans about Maemo’s future. Even without Windows Phone, the Symbian team hated Maemo, and tried to strangle it in the crib numerous times. There’s no way they’d go for Maemo, but rather likely along the path of modernizing Symbian’s UI. (Symbian was robust enough on the inside, but touch support arrived really late on the mainstream devices.)

I also unlike most Maemo fans LIKED Windows Phone. My Lumia 520 was both cheap and quality, and the OS buttery smooth on low end problem. The problem was they moved too late; and perhaps Android would have been the better choice, no matter how shit it actually was. (That, and Microsoft backstabbing WM6, WP7, WP8, and finally WM10 users didn’t help.)

I have lost the link, but was there not a guy/company that did an experiment and soldered the 1200mhz OMAP3640 onto the N900 mainboard by replacing the 600mhz OMAP3430, and thus also doubled the ram? (I think they took the cpu from the droid2, but i am not sure). I think it worked perfectly fine. (the forum with the posts was in the 2010-2013 timespan)

SoC doesn’t mean the RAM is on the chip. I know that at least the OMAP3 used in the OpenPandora and OMAP5 used in the DragonBox Pyra take separate RAM.

(It’s what allowed the OpenPandora to be upgraded from 256MiB to 512 MiB very early in its lifecycle without any board redesign and what will allow them to offer both 2GiB and 4GiB variants of the Pyra without awkward “must match the built-in RAM” requirements for what chips can be used for the second two gigabytes.)

That said, there is a twist to the definition of “on the chip” which may be what you’re thinking of.

Some SoCs… such as the one in my original Raspberry Pi, are designed so the RAM stacks on top of the SoC even though it’s a separate chip.

Exactly, I think judgen is thinking of PoP, or “package on package”, like the BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi. Later versions of the chip used on the Pi were still SoC (system on a chip) but were no longer PoP, with separate RAM chips on the underside of the board. This allowed for better cooling of the CPU itself, necessary with the Pi 3’s BCM2837.

They didn’t give Meego much of a chance, but it was a more mature OS than WP7, and probably WP8 as well. I just resurrected my N9, and notice that others still haven’t caught up with the keyboard. The always on display could be made more useful than the one my Samsung has, and consumed less power.

As for Windows Phone, it only ever got praise for its smooth scrolling and the novelty launcher.

I agree with the N9. I now have a Galaxy Note 8, and the ‘AOD’ is still inferior to the N9’s. Sure it looks nicer, but the functionality of it is no where near as good, and the power consumption is higher as well.

I still love MeeGo over any Android phone I’ve ever owned. The way you handle everything (and the keyboard) just seems more natural.

What I think is sad is dropping WP10 after pushing W8/10 interface based on WP parallel so hard. It worked great for WP, it wasn’t a good idea for desktop yet that’s all they ended up with. f–king ridiculous. (Classic Shell user writing)

MS didn’t “do” anything to Nokia, Nokia board wanted Windows Phone – why do you think they specifically brought Microsoft guy to the position of a CEO?

Maemo/MeeGo projects were troubled, took too long, with restarts along the way, were not helped by internal infighting between it and Symbian and S40 divisions. When MeeGo was getting somewhere with N9, it was already too late / Android had too much momentum (and Nokia board really disliked Android)

Meanwhile Nokia was selling for too many years hardly changing products, just in many packagings…

Only it positioned itself less of a ‘Windows Mobile 2.0 reboot’ like Palm did and just kept at the numbering scheme.

WM6.5 to WP7 was not just the next thing obviously, but to the average user buying a phone it was.

All the app written for the platform were useless upon WP7’s arrival. And it was the same with Palm

Got a Treo 650? Upgrade to a Pre, it’s the same company but all of a sudden all the software I might have bought won’t work.

(Apple ][ > Macintosh anyone?)

But at least Palm tried, I really never saw M$ do much of anything to promote WP after 8.0

I guess they expected Nokia to do all that for them? I still can’t work that out

I had a Nokia Lumia 530 btw, loved it to death. I still put my sim card in it for a few days every now and again

Anecdotally, there’s a Microsoft store in one of the malls by my work. I would venture in occasionally just like I did for the Appel store, just lookin around.

They used to have various Windows Phones on display, but a year or so ago they were gone never to be seen again. That was the point when I really knew for sure that it was dead even if it was practically dead way before that

Though it looks like more and more companies realise that it’s a lot cheaper to have an army of free developers doing the dirty work for you rather than paying thousands of people yourself, there might still be a cultural issue that is preventing MS from open sourcing it. Google realised that and even Oracle abandonned Solaris as there is no money in OSes unless you have full control. You don’t get full control unless by historic precedent (Apple IOS and MSDOS/Windows) or making it free (Android).

It might also be that the code looks too much like Windows 10 (for desktop and server), I don’t know.

And only partially. But I digress, even if the whole was available, I shrug at the idea to dig into such a mess-ive amount of code. Understanding every bit of it would require such a long time it could only be done by a staff of dedicated skilled persons that better redo it from scratch.

I am wondering if Nelson ( http://www.osnews.com/user/Nelson ) has read this. Few years ago he was promoting heavily here Windows phones and how bright future they have based on quarter to quarter sales.

I am wondering if Nelson ( http://www.osnews.com/user/Nelson ) has read this. Few years ago he was promoting heavily here Windows phones and how bright future they have based on quarter to quarter sales.

I’m sure that Microsoft would have pulled funding for Nelson’s social media activity once they made the decision to kill Windows phone.

I am wondering if Nelson ( http://www.osnews.com/user/Nelson ) has read this. Few years ago he was promoting heavily here Windows phones and how bright future they have based on quarter to quarter sales.

Man, the number of times that guy/girl attacked me for stating WP was a failure and dying…

I can take it, but a “damn, sorry, you (AND EVERYONE ELSE) was right” would be nice .

There’s this Gzregorz (I can’t spell Polish names, I’m sorry) that’s sole social media activity was posting in support of Microsoft’s mobile strategy, maybe some other stuff. He’d do it on Reddit and the comments of many more sites.

Actually, Microsoft does not really need an own phone OS now when their embrace of the Android goes to almost the entire system, from Cortana to launcher, to a browser and the office suite. And they still have the patent leverage to control the manufacturers.

I find that fascinating, given how many non-Chrome-based browsers exist for Android. I would completely understand it if an iOS version of Edge used Safari, Apple requires it after all. But Google is fairly open about allowing other browser engines to exist on their platform.

Windows for mobile devices isnâ€™t being canceled, only the current iteration, Windows 10 for mobile. Microsoft is instead focusing their efforts on Adromeda, yes, yes, Google also has a project that uses that name.

Never thought I’d quote Steve Balmer, but the decline of MS here and elsewhere over the last 20 years has been about their poor developer strategy.

The seeds of destruction were sown in the mid 1990 at the height of the Win95 launch – their arrogance took developers for granted – trying to ignore, crush or subvert the rise of both web and Java as crossplatform development tools for the client and server respectively.

Both the web on the client and java on the server were streets ahead in terms of developer productivity – MFC, VB and C++ all paled into comparison. MS tried to kill them but developers voted with their feet.

People in MS of course realized that Java and the features it represented ( automatic memory management, cross platform ‘binaries’, batteries included libraries ) was a good idea – but rather than join the rest of the industry it created it’s own clone – C#/.NET. Similarly with the web – sort of trying to reinvent web markup with XAML.

While C# was and is a nicely designed language, not enough people cared – it’s the platform stupid…

People had got used to being able to write cross platform stuff that just worked – why write in C# on .NET that only worked properly on Windows?

Also it took a long time to make the runtime performant – good VM’s were hard.

They was also a large amount of churn on their tool set – it wasn’t clear what was the future – so developers kept to the sidelines while MS sorted it’s self out.

They lost a large part of a generation of developers, by putting their perceived interests above developers and assuming developers had no choice but to follow as they were the dominant platform….

They now show signs of turning that around, but I think, by and large, it’s too late for propriety MS platforms.

Yes. Moving toward a more web focused application platform and away from a desktop platform will give their developers the flexibility they seek and make it very easy for those developers to publish their applications to the Windows store.

Desktop applications are dead. The legacy stuff that exists will be all that exists for desktop wrt maintenance.

Let’s be honest, if you were a Microsoft phone customer and had your HTC HD2 made insta-obsolete in a matter of months after purchase (no OS upgrade and no ability to run apps of the new OS), and then had the same thing happen with your WP7 phone, would you touch anything from that company again? If you were a retailer, would you stock a device that could be made insta-obsolete in a matter of months?

At one point, the only customers the OS had were true believers and people who accidentally bought the OS while “buying a Nokia”

There are a total of 80 fixes and five improvements/features currently in testing with the feature2 builds.

The Lumia 1520 that I, my wife, and my mother are all using are now over 3.5 year old and are still doing everything we want them to do except

* ABN-Amro Banking app stopped at the beginning of this month. The mobile website has more functionality but is much slower and cumbersome to use

* Duo Lingo doesn’t offer Japanese (iOS only, Android maybe someday)

In the beginning it was a wild ride with smaller and larger OS-Updates all the way to 8.1 “Denim” that greatly improved the functionality (swiping keyboard, notifications, slowmotion camera, miracast, VPN) while keeping the phone crazy fast and easy to use.

Then came the migration to 10 that dropped support for many phones and introduced a bit of slowness and buggyness but gave me better builtin apps and the promise of UWP development for both phone and desktop. 10 got improved over time and my phone is now just as fast and stable as in the 8.1 timeframe with better apps included, but no new hardware, completely shriveled up marketshare and we all know what that does to app-development.

So yes, Windows phone is dead, but on our devices it is working better than ever and it still receives monthly bugfixes. We will probably continue to use them for another 2 years.

(I paid 500 for my wifes and 2×150 for the other 2 later, so 800 Euro is going to give us about 12.5 years of hardware. There is no way I am ever going to be on the 800-Euro-every-2-years-bandwagon)

It was known by some people, but let’s not pretend that sales people in phone shops were telling customers “Buy this ‘phone now and it’ll be obsolete with no upgrade path in 6 months time!” Lots of people bought Windows 7 phones without knowing, or caring, and were rightly upset when they were chucked out into the snow to fend for themselves.

Lets not pretend that sales people in phone shops were telling people “Buy this phone”

But, seriously, lets not pretend that people expected upgrades to to the next Windows, since the large number of phone owners were using Android, which especially then were largely NOT receiving updates.

But, seriously, lets not pretend that people expected upgrades to to the next Windows, since the large number of phone owners were using Android, which especially then were largely NOT receiving updates.

And…? What’s your point? Some people can afford to buy a private aircraft. I can’t. Should I be pissed off because someone’s done well? If you want a flagship phone that badly and can’t afford it, either save up for one or, even better, maybe you don’t need that flagship phone at all and should have other priorities.

let’s not pretend that sales people in phone shops were telling customers “Buy this ‘phone now and it’ll be obsolete with no upgrade path in 6 months time!” Lots of people bought Windows 7 phones without knowing, or caring

It seems that everyone seems to forget the real problem. If Microsoft would have just rolled over some winmo things, if they would have made it open. The app repository things are nice, but adding sources means opening the system to average joe@xda. They copied apple to the extend that they could never compete, not even apple can compete with themselves.

The PRIMARY problems with MSFT’s play in Phone is their lack of focus and lack of commitment.

The problem of â€œthere arenâ€™t enough appsâ€ can be pretty easily solved when youâ€™ve got the money MSFT has. You hold several hundred developer events, with free training. You hand out free phones like candy bars. You PAY companies to port or rewrite their apps to your platform. You lavish money and attention on the top 100 app dev companies. You listen to these people and tailor your platform to make life easy for them.

The problem with phone was divided attention internally (phone was happening at the same time Windows 8 and Windows RT were happening), the lack of mainlining the product internally (it wasnâ€™t really â€œone windowsâ€ until RS 2), the insistence on secrecy internally and externally (THAT worked out well…why not FLOOD the market with protos and previews and get feedback), the overall lack of commitment (they needed to spend millions to promote the platform, as I mentioned earlier), AND last but not least, the lack of a clear vision for the final product. An everymanâ€™s phone? A corporate device? What were they building?

They could have made the phone successful. But it would have taken clear focus and a huge financial commitment. Neither of these was happening given the internal power struggles in the immediately post-Sinofsky era.

No one really needs “moar appz!” on the phone. Give me 20-30 really good, quality apps and that will be all I will ever need on a phone.

Aaah… the “90%” illusion, also known as the “that alternative OS has “90%” of all the apps you need so it should be good enough” illusion.

The problem is that there is always “that one app” a user really wants and can’t get it. And it is different for each user. Be it some sport/fitness app (like Strava which my dad uses), some social networking app like the Instagram app (or some feature of the Instragram app), some local banking app, some local meetup app, some local public transport app, some local university app, that handy app which finds cheap LPG gas stations in your country, etcetera. And I didn’t even have to mention games.

So, between comparable products, no customer who wants these things is going to compromise for little or no benefit and buy a comparable product running “that alternative OS”.

Microsoft should have resolved the app situation no matter what: Dumping phones at cost, make Windows Phone run Android apps (even at a source-compatibility level without play services), you name it. The reason Microsoft is what it is today is because MS-DOS was compatible with CP/M apps but was cheaper.

I don’t get your point. You do realize the sheer amount of apps does not guarantee you will find “that one app”, right? There was a point in BlackBerry history some years ago when their AppStore had quite a huge amount of apps, but it was still useless, since that huge amount was mostly crap, and STILL lacked the most important stuff.

I don’t get your point. You do realize the sheer amount of apps does not guarantee you will find “that one app”, right?

Aww, cut the drivel. You know Android and iOS appserv stores are bigger and better than the Windows Phone store. All the kinds of apps I mentioned in my previous post are more likely to be found on Android and iOS stores than the Windows store.

You know that nobody forces you to argue for the sake of arguing, right?

Aww, cut the drivel. You know Android and iOS appserv stores are bigger and better than the Windows Phone store. All the kinds of apps I mentioned in my previous post are more likely to be found on Android and iOS stores than the Windows store. [/q] Bullshit.

[q]You know that nobody forces you to argue for the sake of arguing, right?

Windows Phones are really solid and have a nice UI, in fact I’d have no problem recommending a Microsoft 640 like my wife has if you don’t need a ton of apps. The call quality is solid, Cortana works really well,takes good pictures, its just a nice solid phone.

They are gonna support the Windows 10 phones until 2019 and the apps that are in the store aren’t gonna be going anywhere because it costs them nothing to keep them up so if you spot one cheap? They really aren’t bad phones.